Russia Cracks Down on Reddit and Wikipedia for Containing Information About Cannabis

Russia is not exactly known for its cannabis acceptance.Although it’s technically not illegal to possess up to six grams of cannabis in Russia (rather, it’s considered an administrative violation of the law), make no mistakes – the country is not a cannabis-friendly place.

This sentiment could not have been highlighted more prominently than last week when Roscomnadzor, a Russian task force policing the Russian media and internet, first banned all of Redditin an attempt to censor two specific subreddits,r/trees and r/rshrooms, which refer to cannabis and psychedelic mushrooms, respectively.

The Federal Drug Control Service in Russia was alerted by one particular thread, “Minimal and Reliable Methods for Growing Psilocybe,” related to the cultivation of mushrooms (which has since been removed). From the FDCS’ perspective, the only way to effectively ban a single thread was to block the entire website, and they did exactly that. After an international uproar, however, Reddit and the Russian government came to an agreement where the offending thread was blocked while the rest of the website was reinstated.